South Shore teammates thrilled to be selected in NHL Entry Draft

Mike Loftus

Monday

Jun 25, 2012 at 12:01 AMJun 25, 2012 at 8:32 PM

Chris Calnan didn’t think it could get any more exciting. He’d heard his name announced Saturday morning in the third round of the NHL Entry Draft at Pittsburgh, and couldn’t wait to be photographed wearing the jersey of the Chicago Blackhawks – the same uniform his uncle, Jeremy Roenick, had once worn.

Then Calnan peeked at a monitor, and his Draft Day experience got even better: Just behind him in the draft order, two friends and Noble and Greenough School teammates – Adam Gilmour of Hanover and Hingham’s Tim Boyle – had also been selected, in the fourth round.

“It was pretty nuts,” Calnan said Sunday, after getting back home to Norwell. “I was smiling even more after I saw that. It was a fun weekend.”

Calnan, a right wing, was selected 79th overall. Gilmour, Calnan’s center at Nobles, was scooped up by the Minnesota Wild, at No. 98, and Boyle went 106th overall to the Ottawa Senators.

While each draftee had their Nobles connection, they all had their separate side stories, too.

For Calnan, it was his relation to Roenick, whose spectacular career (513 goals, 1,216 points) began in Chicago in 1989.

“He’s been a big inspiration,” Calnan said. “He’s one of the reasons I even started playing hockey.”

Calnan didn’t just follow Roenick into hockey: He also began his prep career at Roenick’s alma mater, Thayer Academy. Gilmour started there, too, and he’ll soon be reunited with a former Tiger teammate: Charlie Coyle of Weymouth, a Thayer product and former first-round draftee (28th overall, in 2010), will be attending the Wild’s Development Camp next month with Gilmour.

“Minnesota hasn’t made the playoffs in a while (four straight seasons),” Gilmour said, “but they’re working really hard to improve, and they’ve got a lot of good young prospects like Charlie. It’s great to get drafted by an organization like that.”

Boyle, the younger brother of New York Ranger Brian Boyle, was drafted by the Senators mere months after his older brother’s team fought and won a fierce, 7-game playoff battle against Ottawa, with Brian often at the center of the action.

Tim Boyle may not have liked seeing his brother miss two games because of a concussion, but he was impressed by the Senators.

“I thought they were an unbelievable team, with unbelievable chemistry,” Tim Boyle said. “I was very happy to be picked by them, and very fortunate.”

His big brother wasn’t upset, either.

“Brian was the first person I called, and he didn’t care that it was Ottawa,” Tim said. “He was just so happy for me, that I’d been drafted.”

Boyle, something of a long shot to be drafted (“50-50 whether I’d get picked or not,” he said) after being assigned a Central Scouting rank of 208 among North American skaters, is already getting his first on-ice NHL experience. He left today for Ottawa, where the Senators are holding a one-week development camp.

Calnan and Gilmour have a little time before their development camps to reflect – and to catch their breath after an exciting, but nerve-wracking experience.

“I went in there expecting the worst,” said Calnan, who seemed relatively assured of being selected after earning a Central Scouting rank of 69, then making an excellent showing at the NHL Scouting Combine that included one of several interviews with the ’Hawks. “I tried not to pick a spot where I thought I’d get chosen, because that would have made it a much longer day. I went there thinking that anything could happen, and trying to think I was going to be the last pick in the seventh round.”

That didn’t happen to Calnan, nor to Gilmour (No. 101 on the Central Scouting list). He’d been told he was a probable draftee, but also knew he might not be picked.

“Some days leading up to the draft, I thought about all the possible outcomes. I kind of tortured myself with that,” Gilmour said. “One day I thought ‘yeah, I want to get drafted in the third round; that’d be awesome.’ Another day it was ‘Oh, no, what if I don’t get picked at all? That’d be terrible.’

Nothing, as it turned out, was terrible for the Nobles’ crew, who were among a healthy crop of draftees with New England roots.

“A lot of guys I’ve either played with or worked out with got picked, too. It’s really nice to go in with all of them,” Gilmour said.

“We were all ecstatic,” Boyle said. “I was really happy for Chris and Adam, and they were just as happy for me.”

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